Storage robot at your service: a review of the Drobo

Ars looks at Drobo, the "storage robot" designed to give you flexible and …

Is Drobo's USB-only interface a negative?

One point we wanted to address regards Drobo's reliance on USB 2.0. Unlike most devices at its $499 price point, Drobo only supports USB 2.0, with no FireWire, eSATA, or Ethernet support. From a performance standpoint, this is probably not a problem—Drobo's unexciting USB 2.0 performance gives us scant reason to suspect that the system would perform any better if equipped with a faster interface.

As far as flexibility and utility are concerned, Drobo's USB2-only support is a negative. When we spoke with Data Robotics on this issue, they agreed that only offering USB2 did impact Drobo's attractiveness in certain markets but pointed out that if you are going to release a product that supports only one interface, USB 2.0 is the obvious choice. Furthermore, Drobo is a young product, still in its first revision. Data Robotics wasn't willing to give any specific details at this point but stated that they expect future Drobo releases will support a broader variety of interface options.

Conclusion

At $499 for the empty enclosure, Drobo isn't a cheap product, and it's clearly not for everyone. There are also some inevitable areas where Data Robotics could improve the unit, but the company has signaled that it intends to continue updating Drobo's firmware and available software while simultaneously working on future versions of the product.

The $499 price point also compares well to Infrant Technologies popular ReadyNAS product. Although we've not directly reviewed the most recent ReadyNAS NV+ (and hence don't want to draw too many comparisons between the two products), it's worth noting that while the NV+ does offer some features that Drobo lacks (an LCD display, multiple USB ports, and support for Gigabit Ethernet being chief among these), it does so at a significantly higher price point of $649.

Drobo is also aimed at a somewhat different market than the tech-friendly ReadyNAS series. Where these products emphasize their levels of RAID support and configurability, the entire point of Drobo is to hide such options and decisions from the end user by making them unnecessary considerations. Indeed, if you want a storage solution whose configuration options are open for tweaking and fine-tuning, Drobo probably isn't the best choice. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a product that you can turn on, plug in, and use with no need to ever handle a configuration wizard, Drobo is the perfect choice.

Ultimately, Drobo does what it does very, very, well, and this is a product whose maturity we'll be watching with interest. If you're looking for a secure storage pool that takes the management process out of your hands—and does a good job handling it automatically—look no further.

Pros:

Unit requires virtually no management or configuration, making it ideal for less technical users